bill - 4:50 am on Feb 10, 2009 (gmt 0)

Do a search for RSS ping lists or RSS ping sites and you should find a lot. You don't need to ping a ton of these services to get your updates out there. A lot of them are interconnected and feed off one another's data. A meta service like pingomatic would probably do everything you need.

do you mean writing a little script to do the dirty work?

That's a possibility. The other way to do it is visit the ping site and enter the URL of your feed manually into their form.